Pages

Tuesday, 30 May 2017

British Airways' IT meltdown wipes £500m off value of owner IAG

The IT meltdown that wrecked thousands of holidays has wiped £500m off the value of the International Airlines Group, which owns British Airways.

IAG was 4% lower as trading in London opened for the first time since the bank holiday weekend's widespread cancellations on BA's network.

British Airways' chief executive said he was "profusely" sorry for the computer system failure which he revealed had disrupted 75,000 passengers' flights.

BA said its IT system was back up and running and that it expected to run a full flight schedule at Heathrow and Gatwick airports on Tuesday, but it conceded there was still work to do to reunite a "significant number of passengers" with their missing luggage.

The company's boss, Alex Cruz, told Sky News the power outage which caused the disruption was "a tragedy".

He denied claims from the GMB union the problems were down to BA cutting "hundreds of dedicated and loyal" IT staff and contracting the work out to India to save money.

Mr Cruz insisted those parties involved in the weekend's problems had "not been involved with any type of outsourcing in any foreign countries".

"They've all been local issues around a local data centre who have been managed and fixed by local resources," he said.

British Airways has not revealed exactly where the data centre is that had the problem, but electricity suppliers SSE and UKPN have confirmed they did not experience a power surge at BA's Heathrow hub or HQ nearby.

Mr Cruz said there was "no evidence whatsoever" a cyberattack was behind the computer problems.

He instead cited a "power surge" at around 9.30am on Saturday morning for the "catastrophic effect" on all of BA's systems.